A long time has passed since the last release. There are many changes I cannot remember, but here are most of them:

The tray icon mode bahaviour has been changed a bit. Like it or not, now there is a taskbar button when the main window is not minimized. This change was needed to make mpc appear in taskman and the alt+tab window, and because the taskbar button was not always activating together with the window (bug in windows I guess).

The playlist remembers its items after closing and relaunching the player.

In capture mode, presets can be added to the playlist just like files and saved into a new playlist file format created for this purpose in the first place (.mpcpl).

Image saving to the root directory fixed.

A few "after playback" actions (close, shutdown). It can be found under the Play menu.

Pixel shader effects and a little editor with basic autocomplete abilities. Requirements: dx9 renderless output mode + textured 3d blending + video card with pixel shader support (v2.0+ prefered). Besides the fun it can be used as a little sandbox to experiment with shaders in real-time. The code you write gets compiled on-the-fly and applied onto the video. Disassembled code and other compiler messages can be viewed in the output window. Even if you can't program in any language, there are a few samples to get you started.

Left alt + numpad keys can rotate the picture with certain renderers (see the Output page in the options). Useful when you need to mirror the picture for some reason, or to correct the perspectivity a bit.

Edge-transparency bug of the subtitle renderer fixed. It occured when more shapes were painted on top of eachother.

Online subtitle database. The player can upload, search and download subtitles for recognized movie files in a semi-automatic way. The website was designed to run at different places at the same time, accessing a common database. If you want you can host a mirror yourself, just contact me about it.

Internal webserver can also serve external files now (please don't forget to contribute nice pages :). To extract the pages for the first time, go to the options of the webserver and use the Deploy... button. There is also a new player interface page (an MPC look-a-like!) with cool javascript supported features to update everything in real-time without reloading the page, you should arm yourself with the latest browsers though. Be warned, what you can see, others can see too! :) To prevent that, there is a checkbox to allow localhost connections only.

Internal source filters can reopen files seemlesly when their file handle becomes invalid (wifi...). This has annoyed me for a long time, you'll be pleased if you experience similar problems :) The read-ahead buffer was also increased from 1 to 5 megabytes.

Real's API changed the volume level behind MPC's back, but now it is trapped and eliminated using the detours lib (2k/xp only).

Misc changes to the main menu:

File:

properties/details: A short summary about the currently used codecs. The details depend on how well the source filter can fill in the mediatype structure. Don't be surprised if there is not bitrate or frame-rate, it's normal.

properties/resources: Viewer tab for embeded files inside mkv or dsm. This page is only visible when there is something to view. Save As... button can save the files onto the hard disk, while double clicking opens them in the default browser served using MPC's webserver, when enabled of course.

utils/dsm muxer: With this you can remultiplex your favorite files/streams into dsm. It has a clean and simple interface, conversion should be easy for anyone. Just be sure to try the right mouse button everywhere to find the available options, the context menu is different for different tree item types. Tagging, chapters, attached files and of course video/audio/subtitle streams can be saved into dsm.

Options:

output: There is "lock back-buffer before..." checkbox to fix VMR9's vsync problems. Though it might not work for everyone, or with every video card.

subtitles: "round up to power of two". In the past this option was always on, now it can be turned off to save a little video memory bandwith at higher resolutions. Older video cards don't support it, or have problems texturing the 32bpp subpictures on 16bpp desktop.

subtitles/def.style: "position subtitles relative to the video frame". You will notice that this checkbox have three states. It is undefined for every custom style, therefore the value you set here for the default style gets inherited by them.

Filters:

New mp3/aac source filter. Handles vbr files much better than the mpeg-i splitter of dshow. Another improvement is how the duration becomes more accurate as more samples are played. This filter is also more error resistant to corrupted id3 tags.

Dirac decoder was upgraded to use the 0.5.0 lib.

Mpeg splitter can seek discontinous streams much more reliably now. It just falls back to "seek by bitrate" mode when it detects something wrong in the continuity of the timestamps. Also, it is now able to play streamed mpeg over http (for example vlc's output).

Latest DSM splitter and muxer included.

New decoder for ps2's mpeg audio formats: pcm, adpcm (mostly found in .pss files). Please note that such files can't be seeked by design. If you try the sound will simply mute. It's because the data can be decoded only by starting from the beginning of the file.